The Clique Eternal Volume I - Autumn
by all the shattered pieces
Summary: Massie and her friends haven't seen each other since camp for "social failures" and have been looking forward to getting to know each other in seventh grade. But after the surprise arrival of family friends, they want to befriend the new girl Samantha Perry too. Could she ruin their friendship instead? Not by worming her way in, but by pushing them further and further away... / AU
1. Chapter 1

**The Clique Eternal**

**Volume I - Autumn**

* * *

**Part I - September**

Chapter I

"Massie," said Kendra Block, mother to the social failure sitting on a chair in front of her, petting her dog and checking her phone constantly. It was around eight in the evening, and the sky was dark. "You remember the Perrys are coming tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah, Mom," Massie muttered. She tugged at the hem of her faded green shirt from the camp she went to over the summer, where she had met her best friends Dylan Marvil, Alicia Rivera, and Kristen Gregory. Massie was going to meet them at the movie theater in an hour. She hadn't seen them since camp a month before.

Massie had social problems, specifically friendship problems. All of her "friends" had betrayed her in some way, either by ditching her, being mean to her, ignoring her, or some other cruel thing. So after a while, she just didn't try to be friendly to anybody because it wasn't worth it. Her mom noticed, and after several failed attempts to fix her daughter's friendship problems, she sent her to Camp Honeysuckle. Camp Honeysuckle was a camp for girls with social problems, and it was like normal summer camp, but they did special bonding exercises and stuff to form lasting friendships and lean how to be friends with other people. The three other girls in Massie's cabin were Dylan, Kristen and Alicia, and by the end of the two weeks in August, they were super close. And they were even going to be starting at Octavian Country Day Middle School together! They hadn't been able to meet up over the summer because Alicia did swim team, Dylan's dad had stage four pancreatic cancer and she had to spend the rest of the summer with him, (his cancer was fatal, and the doctors only gave him until the end of August to survive, which was perfectly accurate) and Kristen was in a play as the lead and needed to study her role. But they texted every day and had been able to finally meet all together on the Sunday before middle school started.

"And you remember that they have kids, right?"

Massie nodded, but her mom didn't notice.

"They have two daughters and a son. Their oldest daughter Wendy is sixteen, and their youngest daughter Sammie is twelve like you. Their son Kevin is only five. But Miss Ellen, their mom, said that Sammie's really nervous about making new friends. Would you mind spending the day with her?"

"Mom, I have to meet my friends at the movies tomorrow! I TOLD you that!" Massie yelled. "I haven't seen them all summer, and I want to hang out with them before school starts on Monday!"

"They'll be here around noon, and your movie isn't until one. We're eating lunch with them. I'm sure your friends won't mind bringing Sammie along?"

"I guess not," she said. She was excited to meet Sammie, because it would be the coolest thing ever to be best friends with somebody living less than five minutes away from her! "Want me to help Inez with the guesthouse?"

"Inez is baking cookies for tomorrow, sweetie. The guesthouse still needs to be set up, actually. Would you please take care of it? Here's the key." Kendra smiled at Massie and waved as she crossed the living room and slid open the glass door, walked outside, closed it behind her, and continued until she reached the weathered white front door of their guesthouse. She smiled at the pink roses growing beside the front porch, which wrapped around the entire house and was bordered by the bushes the entire way.

The house looked like her house, but smaller. The outside was painted sunshine yellow with grayish and brownish stones on some parts. The porch was painted white, and there were no shutters on the windows.

Massie unlocked the door and stepped inside. She hadn't been in for a few months, not since she was getting a suitcase from the attic. A layer of dust had covered the interior of the small version of the Blocks' large house.

She walked through the silent rooms, flipping on lights as she went. First, she entered the office. The soft, wheeled chair spun when she pushed it. She turned the computer on and listened as it whirred quietly to life.

Massie left the room, leaving the glass door open behind her. Then she entered the fancy dining room, peering into the cabinet with the gleaming white china. She straightened the chairs and moved into the kitchen.

The silence was scaring her a little. She turned on the small TV on the counter, situated in the corner by the microwave. It was showing a rerun of Dog With a Blog that she didn't really like, but she watched anyways. Anything to break the unnatural quiet.

Massie turned to face the island, and walked around it. She then opened the cabinets to see if they had enough of everything. The plates, bowls, and cups were stacked evenly, but the pots and pans were all jumbled up.

_It was probably from when our cousins visited, _she thought to herself. She stacked them up the way she remembered, and before she closed the cabinet, pulled out a yellow ceramic bowl, and placed it on the counter. Then she opened the fridge to find if anything had been left in.

There were opened containers of yogurt and milk, and some super moldy grapes. Massie held her breath and poured the long-expired dairy products from Easter when her cousins stayed in the guesthouse down the kitchen sink, and only let herself breathe again when she had run clear water over it to wash it down completely. She just tossed the package of grapes into the trash without opening them.

Massie left the kitchen and headed upstairs to the bedrooms. They were barren of all signs of life except for beds and desks. She walked down the hall to the linen closet to pull out the sheets and blankets.

xoxox

After putting all the stuff on the beds, Massie sat down on the bed in one of the rooms. Cleaning was harder than she thought. She wouldn't have agreed to help in any other circumstances, but she was excited for their family friends to come, and she just wanted to make their visit real.

Then, Massie mentally counted. There were two bedrooms on the top floor, plus the master bedroom. There were no bedrooms on the main floor, and the basement had one bedroom.

She had skipped the basement.

Massie figured she could always play the dumb card and say she forgot. The basement was creepy unless she had somebody else with her, and at the moment she didn't. She was completely alone in the house.

She checked her phone. It was getting kind of late, so she should probably be getting home soon. She had to be inside her house by nine unless she was at a friend's house.

Massie walked down the stairs. She turned off everything that she had turned on and walked out the front door, locking it behind her. She set off across the dark lawn towards her own house, hoping that she would fall asleep quickly so that the next day would get there even faster.

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**Hey guys! **

**You probably thought I died or got arrested or moved to Liechtenstein or something, and I'm sososo sorry I haven't been posting anything on here recently! I just needed some time to get started on some new stuff, but now it's SUMMER, and I can write and post and all that fun stuff!**

**And, just fyi, I might need a few suggestions so I can keep this book alive enough to become a series, and that series must be four volumes long! I have all the ideas for this book and the last book and a few for the other two...**

**Well I should stop writing this A/N because it's getting long... tata!**

**xox all the shattered pieces**


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter II

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Sammie Perry sat in the van with her sister Wendy and her brother Kevin. Wendy was driving, and she had called a rest break at the gas station. She was sitting up front, messing around with a cable or something.

"Sammie!" Kevin whined. He was still strapped into his car seat, one of the ones that you're really not supposed to use after you turn five, but their parents were super strict. "Why couldn't I ride in the moving van? I wanted to!"

"Cuz Mom said so," she said, turning to rummage around in her bag. "Did you take my charger? It's not in here." She pushed one of their dogs out of the way to look inside a little more.

"I took it last night, idiot," Wendy said. "I needed to charge my phone. And here it is, right here where I said it would be." She pointed to the cable plugged into the car.

"Oh."

Wendy hopped out of the car and pulled open the door. "Come on, special K," she said as she unbuckled her little brother. "Time to get some fresh air. Sammie, can you stay in the car with the dogs while we get some snacks?"

"It's barely past nine," Sammie muttered in response. "Why do we need snacks?"

"Great, let me know if you want something," Wendy responded as she brushed crumbs off of her brother. "And for the record, I need caffeine. I don't like getting up before the sun. Plus we're still only in Pennsylvania, and we have to be there in four hours. No more stops after this, okay?"

"Could you get me a diet Coke, and a box of cherry pop-tarts?" she asked. "Please?"

"Whatever."

Sammie waited in the car. She pulled out her phone to text her only friend that she had back in Georgia, Helen. She just wanted to talk to somebody that wasn't her brother, sister or dog. And she didn't want to talk to her mom, because she would be all grumpy because she was pregnant (six months until she would be a big sister – again!) and her dad would be grumpy because her mom was grumpy. Plus they were about an hour and a half ahead of them in the moving van.

"Guess that leaves you guys," she said to the dogs. "Well, you four are way more fun than they are."

Lots of people thought it was weird that her family had so many dogs. They were all rescues from the shelter where Wendy volunteered, and they were all well loved. They had Cooper, a really big brown lab that was a sweetie through and through. They had Rose, a mutt with light brown fur and a loud incessant bark. Then they had India and Norway, (note that they didn't name their dogs) large dogs with thick black fur; they were some kind of mystery breed, but they were total lap dogs. Norway was definitely Sammie's favorite because she was always the first one to run up and greet her, plus she was really easy to control on a leash.

Cooper and Norway were napping in the second row of seats amid the suitcases. Norway briefly looked up when she heard Sammie talk, but then she dropped her head back down. Cooper was old and needed his sleep; his graying muzzle was on top of his favorite squeaky toy, just like he was still a protective puppy. India didn't even look at Sammie from where she was in the passenger seat, bragging in a way that she was better than Sammie. Rose was in her crate in the back because she hated car rides.

"Or not," she sighed. "Well, you guys will be my only friends in Westchester."

India glanced back at her with a disdainful look in her eyes.

"What? I don't trust anybody except Helen. All my other friends…" Sammie broke off suddenly. "Well they were horrible friends. Just like Massie will be. She even sounds mean. I'm not going to be her friend, trust me."

xoxox

They pulled into the Block's driveway right on time. Sammie looked out the window at the massive estate. The yellow paint looked cheerful, but her ex-best friend Mandy had a house with yellow paint, and she turned out to be a total jerk.

"Get out of the car, guys," Wendy ordered. "I'll get the dogs. You go socialize or whatever.

"Wen, I really-"

"Sammie, go. She looks nice enough. Have fun."

Sammie sighed. "Fine."

She got out of the car with Kevin and walked over to Massie. He immediately broke free to play with the dogs.

"So…" Massie looked at Sammie carefully, but not in a mean way. "I'm Massie. I guess we'll be neighbors?"

Sammie looked at her, and her nervous smile, and – _this is so horrible of me,_ she thought – then she started laughing. Like, really hard, and she couldn't stop even though she tried.

"Samantha?"

Sammie stopped when she heard her birth name.

"I go by Sammie. And sorry for laughing, I just don't…"

"Dude, it's fine." Massie smiled at her. "I used to bite my nails constantly. Wanna know why I finally stopped?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Well, I'm in the orchestra program at OCD, and it starts in your second to last year at the elementary school, which for us is fifth grade. I play flute, by the way. And in between songs at our biggest concert of the year, which was the end of sixth grade, I was biting my nails. So I guess a little piece of fingernail got caught in my throat, and I started coughing. And this was after the second song, I think, and we played six songs. So I was coughing for the rest of the concert, and I couldn't even play my instrument or I would mess up the songs."

Massie and Sammie both started cracking up.

"Wow, that's pretty awful!"

"I know!" Massie stopped laughing. "Hey, did they put you in orchestra?"

"I don't know. I don't have a schedule yet."

"Oh, you're not registered on the website yet, are you?"

"No – wait, they have a website?"

"Yeah, let me show you!"

xoxox

Massie and Sammie sat side by side on Massie's bed, with her laptop between them. "Here, I'll log on as me."

"Okay."

"You have to log on with your real name and your student number. But for the games and stuff you can use a nickname," Massie explained to her new neighbor. "This is the main page. It basically gives you a virtual version of the sheet you get each morning with your school ID card, which is the lunch menu, schedule, your student point balance, and then sometimes a little news blurb. But it's cooler on the website, because there are videos and stuff."

"Cool." Sammie stared at the screen. She had driven past the school before she got to the Blocks' house, and it looked kind of old-fashioned, not the type of school that would use cool technology. Well, she'd always heard to never judge a book by its cover…

"And if you click on your schedule, it'll pull it up on a separate page. And from there, you can click on your teacher's name and it'll pull up their page, which has homework and test dates on it. Or if you click on the class name, it'll pull up the class work, study guides, et cetera."

"Are the classes hard?"

"Nah." Massie shook her head as she clicked on more things. "I'd say the hard ones are cooking and orchestra, or the equestrian team if you join that. And English has always been hard for me."

"Same here!"

"No way!" she laughed. "Okay, and on here is the good stuff. You can set up your student email account, which is awesome. And you can play games, they're all "educational" but whatever, I always thought they were super fun. And if you go on here, you can track your student points."

"What's that?"

"Oh, they never explain anything well in the handbook, do they?" Massie continued, not really expecting a response. "Well, you have two options for buying things at school. You can either use cash or student points, but most people use the point option. One point is equal to a dollar, but you can't cash them in or anything, and a lot of times you only earn partial points. You can earn them in the games, or if you make an A, or sometimes the teachers will give points to the students that volunteer to run an errand or something. It's pretty cool. They start in middle school, but we got to practice at the initiation camp over the summer. That's how I know how it works."

"Initiation camp?"

"The high school spirit squad runs it. Don't worry, you weren't even here to sign up."

"Oh."

The girls were silent for a few moments.

"I'm sorry, am I being boring?" Massie asked.

"No, of course not," Sammie told her. "It's just kind of too much to remember for me."

"Yeah, of course, you're new."

"Yeah."

The intercom on the wall crackled to life.

"Massie, Sammie, time for lunch!"

"Okay!" they yelled back in tandem, then yelled, "jinx! Double jinx!"

The two girls collapsed in laughter.

"We should eat fast," Massie said. "I have to meet my friends to see a movie. I got a ticket for you too, is that cool?"

"Of course," Sammie lied as her laughter immediately dried up.

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**So? What do you think? You love it? Hate it? Want to throw it in a toaster oven and put rainbow sprinkles on it?****  
**

**I'm in a writing mood today :)**

**xox all the shattered pieces**


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